Walter Gropius

Before founding the Bauhaus, Gropius had already completed two precedents of modern architecture. The 1911 Fagus Factory, with Adolf Meyer, was the first building where the glass curtain wall cantilevered past structural columns — no column at the corner, only glass, a treatment that later became the lingua franca of modern office buildings. The 1914 model factory for the Deutscher Werkbund Exhibition further pushed the industrial language of steel, glass, and brick toward monumentality.

After the Bauhaus closed, Gropius's engagement with housing became more systematic. He saw standardization not as monotony but as the condition for replicating good design. His Kupferhaus prefabricated system attempted to turn buildings into transportable industrial products. At the Törten estate in Dessau, he practiced the rational layout of low-rise, high-density row houses.

In 1937, fleeing the Nazi regime, Gropius moved to the United States and became chair of the architecture department at Harvard's Graduate School of Design. He educated a generation of modernist architects in America, including I. M. Pei and Philip Johnson. The Architects Collaborative (TAC), which he co-founded in 1946, practiced a democratic mode of architectural design — no star architect, only equal partners.

His most personal American work is the Gropius House (1938) in Lincoln, Massachusetts. The white-walled, flat-roofed house merged Bauhaus formal language with New England vernacular traditions — white-painted clapboard, stone plinth, wooden trellis. Gropius insisted on using local American materials and techniques, refusing to simply replicate European modernism. The Harvard Graduate Center (1950) and Boston's Kennedy Federal Building represent his late public work.